The present invention relates to a trail analysis of a movable object such as a human or other, particularly to a method of analyzing a contact status between movable objects and a system therefore.
In related art, there has been developed a system for monitoring position of a walker moving in a facility such as a shopping center by installing a plurality of receivers in the facility and carrying the walker with a transmitter. Such a system allows providing information depended upon the attribute and current position of the walker to the walker.
Use of the above system allows extracting features common to a plurality of walkers or all walkers in the facility by acquiring and analyzing a moving history of a walker. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2001-266010 discloses to apply such a system to a retail store to analyze migration condition of a customer in a shop and staying time thereof at a sales floor. The system can monitor movement of each walker but cannot monitor contact situation of the walker with the other person so that the walker talks with the other person. Accordingly, the system cannot perform analysis on service of an employee in a retail store and the like.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2003-263641 discloses an apparatus for analyzing behavior of a customer by means of an video camera arranged in a shop. This describes attendance-on-customer detection, but does not describe a concrete detection method. This method is thought to be poor in utility because detection is difficult due to position of a video camera, or the detection of the customer movement using the video camera is difficult in terms of privacy.
The present invention is directed to provide a trail analysis method capable of detecting effectively contact between moving objects without visual inspection and a system therefore.